THE CRY OF THE CHILDREN.

Lyttelton Times, Volume XCIX, Issue 11557, 19 April 1898, Page 2

THE CRY OF THE CHILDREN.

HOW FOREIGN JEWS BEING STARVATION TO LONDON. {Ludgate Monthly.] ‘ How long,” they say, “ how long, O cruel nation Will you stand, to move the world, on a child’s heartStifle down with a mailed heel its palpitation. And tread onward to your throne amid the mart ? Our h ood splashes upwards, 0 our tyrants! And your putph shows your path ; But the child’s sob curseth deeper iu the silence Thau the strong man in his wrath!” As a workman, tlie foreign Jew is to East London what the Chinaman is to San Francisco,- as an employer, it is he who is mainly responsible for the beggarly wages that are paid to box-makers and paper-bag makers, since, with very few exceptions, the middlemen for whom the women and ■ children work in these two industries are Jews. But in no trade has the effect of this foreign competition been so marked, as in .furniture - polishing. In more than one locality the Polish .Jews have entirely taken possession of this industry, even buying out tboir former employers, with the result that only the better class of work—which they do not undertake —now receives its former rate of payment. The furniture polishing of the East End is confined almost solely to the cheapest and commonest kinds of furniture, although there are several factories where the better kinds are prepared for furniture shops in more expensive quarters of the town, but as these places do not in any way affect children, they cannot come within the description of this industry. Before the JEWISH COMPETITION, a polisher could on an average earn 28s a week, hut the Polish, Russian and Armenian refugees were glad to accept half that sum for the same amount of labour, and consequently 14s a week, and even less, has become the usual week’s earnings of the native workman. In order to increase this pittance, many of the polishers, instead of going to big workshops where the work is done wholesale, have attached themselves to one or more of the smaller furniture shops, or to the carpenters who supply these establishments, preferring to run the risk of irregular employment rather than rely upon the 14s which would otherwise be their regular wage. As the polishing must be done in their own homes, they can only take thelesser articles — such as small chests of drawers, small tables, chairs, whatnots, brackets, &c. —all belonging to the very commonest class of furniture that is sold. In all these trades one case of CHILDISH MISERY AND HABDSHIP. is so painfully similar to countless others that it seems as though the weary monotony of the gray streets, with their little two-storeyed houses, had crept into these pitiful lives, crushing out all brightness for the future and leaving its hideous trail of work, work, and yet again work, over the present and the past. And, therefore, one instance will serve to show how this Jewish invasion, with the resulting wholesale lowering of wages, has fallen with crushing and damning force upon the shoulders of the little ones. A ground floor, consisting of two small rooms, of a four-roomed house, in a street pestilential with decaying vegetables and all the refuse of its thriftless and dirty inhabitants, was occupied by a furni-ture-polisher and his family. Formerly the man had been a steady workman earning fairly good wages at his trade in a neighbouring factory, but the gradual reduction of price at length forced him to set up in business for himself, f a largefurniture ■ shop giving him irregular employment for a remuneration per piece no better than that given by his old factory. In the factory, however, he could make no use of his children; in his home he was master and beyond the reach of Acts of Parliament. Of this man’s three children the eldest was a girl of fourteen, a stunted, sickly-looldng little creature, who had “ just left school ” after months and months of half-time attendance, and an education that was practically a mockery; the other two were a boy of twelve and a younger girl of nearly eleven. Father, mother and three children were all polishers, THE SCHOOL HISTORY OF THE ELDEST GIRL being repeated in the case of her brother and sister. The back room where the work was carried on was a noisome kitchen, the light of its one broken window being almost blocked out by a pile of small tables that stood before it. Chests of drawers, chairs, all of the commonest wood and put together in the most slovenly and haphazard manner, were heaped pell-mell against the walls, leaving only a little space in the centre of the room close to the fireplace on which an evil-smelling compound was simmering in an iron pot. When the writer visited this inferno of a workshop, the mother and eldest daughter were hard at work polishing a chest of drawers, the father being engaged upon a gimcrack whatnot, that his rubbing nearly forced into pieces, whilst the two younger children were rubbing a deal table, the boy being responsible for the top, the girl for the legs. Before being polished, furniture, even of this description, must be well rubbed with sandpaper, and on either side beneath the table was a line of emeryparticles, like a train of gunpowder—the girl, it will be remembered, slept upon the floor, and must, therefore, have been breathing these particles into her lungs all night long. The hands of these five people were stained almost black. In negotiating a hard knot in the surface of the table the boy uttered a sharp cry, and pulled off the pad with which he was rubbing. HIS FINQEES WEEK THOSE OF A SKELETON. The spirit and the perpetual friction of rubbing had so hardened both skin and flesh that they seemed one with the bone; and although he had caught the up-turned edge of the knot with some sharpness, there was so little flesh upon his poor fingers, and the skin was so tough, that he had not cut himself. But his pain was greater in consequence. None of the others stopped their work or seemed take any notice of the accident, and after alittle while he resumed his polishin g,rubbingas softly as he could, his tears splashing down upon the wet varnish and making sad havoc of the part already finished. At last his father swore at him and threatened “ the strapthen the sobs ceased and the child rubbed as hardly as before. To the casual observer nothing could be worse than the condition of this family—the mother and girls rubbing hour after hour with stooping and aching backs, the small boy adding to the pain of hisiniured hand with every stroke, and the father, morose and silent, working as diligently in his corner. But there was an added horror, a horror that had stamped itse'f upon the mother’s lined and haggard face, and was reflected in the furtive and frightened glances with which the children occasionally looked at their father. He was a confirmed drinker of methylated spirits.